Chapter 9
 
Willow leapt up so quickly, it was as though she’d levitated herself. “No!” she cried as she reached out for the pendant.
 
Spike spun to one side so that Willow’s grasping hand missed its aim.
 
“Give that back!”
 
Spike twisted rapidly back and forth, easily evading Willow’s attempts to grab the crystal. “Uh… let me think. Okay, I’ve thought. No.”
 
Willow shuddered and pursed her lips in anger. The pupils of her eyes expanded to obscure her irises, a couple of veins in her forehead pulsed black and inkiness began to creep up her hair from the tips. “The magicks I use are very powerful. I'm very powerful. And maybe it's not such a good idea for you to piss me off, vampire.” She raised her hand to gesture at Spike.
 
For the first time since Buffy had known Willow, she began to feel real fear of her friend. She took a step forward to intervene, but hesitated when Xander moved to place himself between Willow and Spike.
 
“Okay, I think we’ve all had enough of the magic for one night, Will.” He gestured at her eyes and hair. “And I’m not liking the Darth Willow look at all. All this… this puppet-mastery of your friends. This isn’t you, Willow. What’s happened to you?”
 
“I grew up!” Willow spat. “I discovered that the world is a place full of real scary monsters and that I have the power to do something about them! Everything I’ve done has been to help! Why can’t you people see that?”
 
“Stealing our memories wasn’t helping, Willow, neither was the spell to stop Buffy eating. And I know that sometimes Anya can say something that we think is cringeingly tactless, but that was no reason to gag her! She’s been acting so unAnya-like, I was beginning to wonder what I’d ever seen in her!” He smiled broadly at Anya. “You’re gonna start saying just what you think again, right?”
 
Anya grinned and wrapped her arms around him, pulling his head down for a passionate kiss. “I love you, Xander Harris,” she said breathlessly when they finally broke apart.
 
“Xander? You’re turning against me too?” Willow asked in disbelief.
 
Giles addressed Willow, his expression furious.  “I couldn’t agree with Xander more.  All of these spells have done nothing to help us. All they have done is adjust our behaviour to suit you and put us in even more danger than usual due to our own ignorance.” He nodded to Spike. “Go ahead, Spike. Break it.”
 
The heel of Spike’s heavy boot made short work of the crystal. Almost lost under Willow’s desperate wail of “Noooooooo!” was a faint whimper from Tara as her legs gave way beneath her and she sank to the floor.
 
After a quick glance at Willow who, with tears streaming down her cheeks, stood stretched a pleading hand out to her girlfriend, Buffy moved to kneel beside Tara. She wrapped her arms around the quietly sobbing girl and drew her face into her shoulder.
 
She glared up at Willow. “Tara? You put a spell on Tara? How could you, Willow? I thought you loved her!”
 
“I do!”
 
“So then… why…?”
 
Tara raised her head. “I th-think she does love me, in her own way. As long as I don’t go against her.”
 
“I just wanted us not to fight any more,” Willow cried.
 
Tara swiped away her tears and stood up to face Willow. “If you don't wanna fight, you don't fight. You don't use magic to make a fight disappear.”
 
“But I just wanted to make things better. Make us happy again.”
 
“You don't get to decide what is better for us, Will. We were in a relationship, we were supposed to decide together.”
 
“Okay. I'm… I realise. I, I did it wrong.”
 
“You did it the way you've started doing everything. When things go in a way you don’t think is right, you… you don't even consider the options. You just… you just do a spell. It's not good for you, Willow. And it's not what magic is for.”
 
“But I… I just wanna help people.”
 
“Maybe that's how it started, but… you're helping yourself now, fixing things—and what’s even worse, people—to your liking. I… I can’t do this any more, Willow.”
 
Tara turned to Buffy. “I’m sorry, Buffy. I have to go. I can’t be here with…”
 
Buffy nodded and hugged her. “I understand. I’m so sorry.”
 
“Tara? Sweetie? Are you… Are you breaking up with me?” Willow reached out to take Tara’s arm.
 
“Don’t touch me!” Tara flinched and pulled away. “Yes, Willow. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I am. I’m going back to the dorm to pack my stuff and then I’ll go over to Terri’s. I can stay there until I find a place of my own.”
 
Willow collapsed into helpless sobs while Tara stoically gathered up her possessions and left, with a promise to Buffy that she would keep in touch.
 
Anya stood with her arm linked possessively through Xander’s and regarded Willow who sat curled up in the corner of the couch, crying her eyes out. “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” she said scornfully. “You’ve managed to scare off your girlfriend and piss off every single one of your friends, not to mention a century old master vampire.”
 
She raised an eyebrow at Giles. “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to see that she was properly trained so that she’d actually understand the ethics of magic and the consequences of what she was doing?”
 
Giles cleared his throat and looked down guiltily, taking his glasses off. “Ah, well…”
 
“Please tell me that at least you explained the Wiccan rule of three? Because she doesn’t appear to have given that a moment’s thought while she’s been manipulating us all up the Wazoo for the past couple of years.”
 
“Hmmm… It may not be too late,” Giles tapped one arm of his glasses against his pursed lips for a few seconds as he contemplated the redhead. Replacing them upon his nose, he said, “Uh, Willow, would you be willing to spend some time as a trainee of a coven I know in England? I think you could benefit tremendously from the experience.”
 
That caught Willow’s attention and brought her out of her personal pit of self-pity. She raised her blotched face, sniffed, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “England? You want to send me to England? I can’t go to England! You need me here! What about Glory? Don’t you need…? And… Oh! School!”
 
“It need not be immediately, Willow, as long as you are willing to assure me you will refrain from casting any more frivolous or self-serving spells in the meantime. I believe I could arrange for you to spend the summer there. I have a feeling that a couple of months under Ms Harkness’ tutelage would be very… uh… enlightening for you. In fact, I fear I must insist.”
 
Willow looked at Giles suspiciously for a long moment, then her attitude melted away and she sighed. “You’re not gonna trust me with the magic unless I do, are you?”
 
“Well, no. To be honest, probably not, but that’s not the main reason why I think it would be a good idea. I’m very much afraid that if you continue using magic in the same thoughtless, self-serving manner to which you have become accustomed, it won’t be too long before you do some irreparable harm to yourself, or to those close to you.”
 
“I… I’ll think about it, Giles,” Willow said sullenly. “And I promise I won’t do any more spells unless there’s a demon or something. Now, I think I’d better leave too,” she said, standing and picking up her backpack. “After everyone has added their ten cents worth to the whole ‘Willow is a bad person who has done everything wrong’ lecture, I can see I’m not welcome here.”
 
Buffy stepped forward and held up a hand to stop her. “I’m not happy with you, Willow, and I’m not ready to forgive you, but for now, I need you to stay. You need to hear what happened to me that summer and understand the reason why what you did hurt me so much.”
 
She grabbed Spike by the hand and led him to the armchair that Giles had vacated, pushed him down into it and climbed into his lap. “Get comfy, people. I’ll try to keep it to the Cliff notes version.”
 
As her friends settled down, Buffy mused aloud, “Now then… where to begin?”
 
“How about you start with why you left in the first place?” Xander suggested.
 
“’Kay. That’s as good a place as any.” Buffy cast her mind back. “Well, you all know what happened with Angelus. So many people died because I couldn’t kill him.” She gave a little shrug. “After I had to send Angel to hell with his soul, I guess I was kinda broken. I decided I was such a bad slayer, it would be safer for all of you if I stopped being the slayer and got far, far away from you all.”
 
“But…” Xander began.
 
“Please, Xan… let me get this all out? We can do the Q and A thing when I’m done, ‘kay?” Xander nodded and Buffy continued, “I needed to just be Buffy for a while to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Then when I got to L.A, I made up my mind I didn’t really want to be Buffy any more either, it was too painful, and so I tried to make a new life for myself.
 
“I decided to call myself Anne, found a room in a cheap boarding house and a job as a waitress in a diner that wasn’t too fussy about hiring people with no IDs, and tried to disappear.” She paused for a few moments, gnawing on her bottom lip as she tried to figure out how to explain the next part without freaking everyone out.
 
“And that’s where I came in,” Spike said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze.
 
Buffy rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Yeah, drunk out of your skull.”
 
“Not too drunk to track you down once I caught your scent!”
 
“But too drunk to fight. ‘I’m gonna kill you and then she’ll love me again’. Pfft! You swung at me twice, missed, fell on your ass and passed out cold.”
 
“And you just scarpered and left me there by the dumpsters! I could have dusted when the sun rose!”
 
Buffy looked across at her audience and explained, “He came to meet me after my shift every night after that. Usually too drunk to fight properly and…”
 
“And you still didn’t even try to stake me. A couple of punches, a fancy kick or two and you were off. Took me a while to notice that you weren’t even carrying a stake.”
 
Buffy shrugged. “Like I said. I didn’t want to be the slayer any more.”
 
“Trying to commit suicide by vamp, more like,” Spike muttered darkly.
 
“And what about you? You’re one to talk, you never even went fangy. You were so destroyed by Dru dumping you that you were trying to commit suicide by slayer!”
 
Willow had been sufficiently drawn out of her own misery to become interested. “Wait! Drusilla dumped you? I thought you’d been together for like, a thousand years?”
 
“Well, nearly a hundred and twenty,” Spike said. “She was mad at me for betraying bloody Angelus and spoiling her party. The poor thing was too loopy to understand that if the world had gone to Hell, the food supply would have dried up. Found her making out on a park bench with a Chaos demon, then when I’d killed it, she went and turned a hulking great Angelus lookalike to be her new pet and took herself off with him. Said I wasn’t hers any more, that all she could see when she looked at me was the slayer.”
 
Buffy patted his hand. “She didn’t deserve you, honey.”
 
“And now that’s the part I don’t get,” Xander said. “How did you go from fighting all the time to…” he gestured at the couple wrapped up together in the chair, “this?”
 
“One night while we were having our daily fight, this herd of Polly demons appeared and decided they wanted to kill us both.”
 
“Polgara demons, slayer.”
 
“Yeah, whatever. Anyway, we ended up fighting together to kill them all.”
 
“Good fight, that was,” Spike grinned.
 
“Yeah, it was. Well, except for the dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs and sprained ankle.”
 
“I fixed you up good and proper though, didn’t I pet?”
 
It was Giles’ turn to comment. “You administered first aid to the slayer?”
 
“Carried me home too,” Buffy said with a smug grin. “And then I had to patch him up as well. He’d managed to get himself skewered in three places. Then by the time we were both mummified with bandages, the sun was up and he was stuck at my place for the day.”
 
“Yeah, and I had to sober up,” Spike added with a grimace.
 
“I couldn’t go back to work until I’d healed up enough to walk, so we spent the day together. It wasn’t long before we both got bored and actually started talking instead of fighting. The next day when he came to meet me after my shift we didn’t fight, we just kept talking. Then before we knew what was happening, we discovered we were friends.”
 
“That was when the rules according to Buffy made their first appearance,” Spike mock complained with a roll of his eyes.
 
“Rule number one: No killing people,” Buffy said. “I may have been fighting my destiny as the slayer, but I couldn’t allow him to keep feeding. It was butchers’ blood or the stake.”
 
“And you agreed to that?” Giles asked Spike.
 
“Yeah. Gave my word. It wasn’t so bad. I did miss the violence for a few days, but then I managed to persuade the slayer she should start patrolling. Much more fun hunting and fighting demons than pathetic weak humans anyway.”
 
“It kinda started as a comfort thing, but we soon worked out we had both developed uh… feelings,” Buffy said, feeling her cheeks heat up as she tried to explain how their relationship had evolved without actually saying the words. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”
 
“Well, except for that little trip we took to a Hell dimension to rescue a bunch of people from slavery.”
 
“Oh yeah.” Buffy grinned at him. “It turns out that slaying is so much more fun with my own tame vampire to watch my back.”
 
“Oy! Not tame!”
 
“Uh… domesticated?” Spike pouted, and Buffy chuckled, ruffled his hair and gave him a quick kiss. “Anyway, it was then that we decided that we should come back to Sunnydale.”
 
“Was gonna give the slayer a few days to get settled in and break the news gently, while I did a bit of detective work before joining her.”
 
“And that was when I did the spells,” Willow whispered guiltily.
 
“Yeah, so I didn’t remember the getting over killing Angel part, and the being happy and falling in love again part, and the finding slaying fun part…”
 
“AndI couldn’t remember why it was so urgent for me to get to Sunnydale, which was why it was so bloody frustrating and confusing when I couldn’t get to Sunnydale!”
 
“And he had to go through the whole missing Dru thing again, but alone. He couldn’t share it with me,” Buffy said with a sympathetic squeeze of Spike’s hand.
 
“And so that’s why you were so miserable, Buffy. I’m so sorry.”
 
“And then of course when I found out I was pregnant…”
 
“Major trauma time.” Willow nodded. “I get it, Buffy. I totally get it. I really am sorry.”
 
Giles cleared his throat. “And do you intend to continue…” he took his glasses off and used them to gesture at Buffy and Spike. “That is…”
 
“You mean are we a couple?” Buffy smiled softly into Spike’s wide, hopeful eyes. “Oh yeah. No way am I gonna lose him again.”
 
Spike cupped the back of her head and drew her into a tender kiss, so that she almost missed Anya’s question which wasn’t quite drowned out by Xander’s exaggerated groan of disgust.
 
“So what do you think Riley’s going to say about all this?”
 
Buffy finally had to break the kiss to breathe and while she panted desperately, Spike asked, “Who’s Riley?”
 

A/N:
A few lines borrowed and partially adapted from:
S6 Ep4 ‘Flooded’, Written by Douglas Petrie & Jane Espenson.
S6 Ep8 ‘Tabula Rasa’, Written by Rebecca Kirshner
S5 Ep7 ‘Fool for love’, Written by Douglas Petrie